Word: bellowings
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Unfortunately, Bellow has a problem connecting. Corde recalls from the Bucharest flat in endless flashbacks and conversations the list of horrors, but we can't manage to see them quite so vividly as Corde does. Only once does Bellow, who seems to stand fairly close behind Corde, trying to speak over his protagonist's shoulder, break through. Describing a case in which a man kidnaps a woman, rapes her repeatedly and locks her in the trunk of his car, finally shooting her and dumping the body in a trash heap. Bellow drives home the point of a world...
That doesn't sound so much like horror or anarchy or even the insides of the horror, the causes of it. It sounds more like studied expression, a bit of stylized rhetoric and not a real indication of where the problem lies. Possibly Bellow intends to convey the impotence of to speech about the subject. But that seems unlikely. Though Corde is not Bellow, there is an unmistakably close relationship between the intellect of creator and character...
...another, more important, reason why the reader can never feel so urgent a threat from the debris of the city as Corde lies in the logorrhea of the work, idea-rrhea, maybe, would be a better word. Bellow has long made the wild stringing of ideas a calling card of his, utilizing it next in Herzog. The average Bellow chapter contains mention of more great thinkers than there are on the Modern Library publication list, and usually he pulls it off. But in The Dean's December one senses the so-called "novel of ideas" working back-on itself, turning...
...somehow large quantities of "Baudelaire and Rilke, even Montesquieu and Vico; also Machiavelli; also Plato" still get slathered over everything. The novel does not asphyxiate beneath this icing. But it is certainly not Bellow's best staff...
Luckily, crime and the underclass are not the only element in The Dean's December. Bellow may not have achieved the great foray into the alien waters he had hoped for, but he remains brilliantly entertaining on his home turf. In particular, his characters are dazzling. Valeria Raresh, Corde's mother-in-law, for whom the Corders have traveled to Rumania (Bellow, incidentally, also went to Bucharest several years ago with his mathematician wife on a similar journey) lies in a state hospital, her face criss-crossed with tapes and tubes. After a coronary and a stroke, it is only...